Ghostchild
by Spasmodic dust bunny
Summary: A short ficlet about what happens to Roger after he dies. I tried to write it in the style of Lyra's dream.


A/N Wheee, first fanfic! After reading fanfics for months, I finally got an account. I know, I'm so lazy. Okay, Not much else to say. This is just a one-shot thing, please r/r. Disclaimer; Guess what? it turns out that I'm Philip Pullman's second stepcousin three times removed, and he gave me the rights to His Dark Materials. HAHA! Fooled you ... No? I didn't? Oh. *goes into corner and sulks* Okay, I'll stop rambling now.  
  
Ghost-child  
  
White.  
  
But how can there be white? There can't be, not in this place, that is for sure. For there is no color in this place, there is nothing but a dim grayish tint, a shade as heavy and oppressive as the place itself.  
  
And what is this place?  
  
No one knows for certain, not even the small figure down below, the only disturbance in an otherwise flawless, slightly undulating endless sheet of gray. The figure is a boy, walking on an imaginary road. He is walking with the confidence and careless manner of someone who knows exactly where they are going and why they are going there. Yet he is anything but careless, and he couldn't know where he is going, for it seems to him that he had only just arrived in this unknown world.  
  
Before that, he had been someplace else, someplace with colors. With white. And he had been lying on, no, slipping on the white. And he had been slipping away from something, or someone important, and this had caused a great portion of his heart to feel as if it had been seized by an invisible hand and wrenched away... While he is remembering this, for the first time, a cry escapes the little boy's lips.  
  
"Salcilia..."  
  
The cry hangs there in the still air, shimmering like a dewdrop frozen in the instant after it has dropped off a flower's petal, and before it hits the ground. But eventually the cry dies, and fades away as all things must do in the end. As the boy himself has done.  
  
For this boy is dead. And while it is true that this dead boy, this little ghost-child does not know where he is going, he most certainly knows why he is going there, wherever there happens to be. He is going there because of the great tug in his very soul that draws him towards his unknown destination. If he still has a soul. Even if he does not, then the tug is in the very structure of his pale little form, and the tug tells him that he must keep going, he must continue onwards, and only then will he be at peace.  
  
And so he continues onwards. How long he wearily lifts his feet, only to bring them down again a few inches away, no one can tell. How can they? How can you measure time in a place where no sun ever rises, no shadows ever lengthen, no stars ever twinkle in a night sky? Yet some strange form of time must pass, for there are shapes emerging in front of the boy. Shapes that are made of the same matter as he is, shapes that are the same as he is, ghosts. There are millions of them, moving in a single wave, which the little child joins. He is then lost among the masses of ghosts who are children, mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends and some who are nothing at all.  
  
All of the ghosts appear to have felt the same tug that the little boy felt, for all are moving in the same purposeful direction, towards what looks like a town, or a camp. A town made of ramshackle buildings, little shacks of wood or tin, and a jumble of stones, pieces of timber and rubbish that may have once served a purpose but does no more. This is the destination of the ghosts, and now they are moving through the town, in the direction of a large lake, or sea, or something like that, which is covered with mist and whose dark surface echoes with the cries of birds.  
  
Where has the little boy gone?  
  
He has gone with the others, towards the black water with its slightly rippling surface. The multitude of ghosts have drifted apart by now, for although they are all making their way to the shore, they do so in a loose and almost aimless fashion, as if they just all had happened to stray that way by chance. At the end of the path that the ghost boy is treading, there is a small dock, and beyond that, only the mist-covered water.  
  
The boy goes and stands on the dock. Beneath his lighter-than-a-feather feet, green mold grows on the rotting planks, so old that they look as if they have been there since before time itself began. For they have. Yet as old as the dock is, older even is the boat that is moored to it, a dilapidated, ancient rowboat that looks as if it couldn't stand to hold itself together much longer, much less take passengers across a lake. And if the dock is old, and the rowboat older, than oldest of all is the boatman in the boat. Oldest is his hunched and crippled form, his bony hands clutching the wooden oar, and his creased and wrinkled face.  
  
His is the face of death.  
  
Hardly knowing what he is doing, only knowing that this is what he must do, that this is what has been done for centuries past, and will be done for centuries more, the child steps into the boat and sits down on its cracked wooden bench. He is doing this because while it is not a law in the sense of a law that is done to make life more orderly, it is a law just like -  
  
"- Just like it is a law that when I scoop water up in my hand, the water will fall down again into the lake. It is a law like that one." It is the boatman who has spoken, in a voice that is harsh and yet sad at the same time. He has finished the little boy's thought, even though it is just that, a thought, and nothing more.  
  
Another ghost enters the boat and sits down as well. This ghost is of a child also, but a child who would have been on the brink of adulthood. Would have been. Her eyes are eyes that have seen too many painful things and nameless horrors, have seen just one too many lives stopped short and stolen away. She is clutching another ghost, a little baby boy whose dark round eyes take in everything, and who doesn't cry at all.  
  
In fact, out of these three passengers and the boatman, the only one who makes any sound at all during the ride is the little ghost boy. Over and over, like a chant, he whispers one name.  
  
"Salcilia, Salcilia, Salcilia..." No one else takes any notice. Not the girl or the baby, who have their own thoughts to ponder over, and certainly not the boatman who has seen enough ghosts before to satisfy all the questions he might have had.  
  
The same strange form of time that had passed before is passing again now, for suddenly instead of just the smooth surface of the water, there is a shore, and a narrow wharf. The boat slows to a stop without so much as a creak, and the ghosts depart.  
  
The little boy follows the girl onto the shore, then up a gentle slope towards the stone wall in the instance, shrouded by mist. They finally reach the wall, and the boy raises a weary hand to open the ancient wooden door. He opens it, and the pale forms slip inside like dry autumn leaves. And they will never come out.  
  
How can they? For this is the world of the dead, and once someone has gone inside, they cannot leave. Nothing can ever change that. That is the way it was meant to be, and has always been. And that is the way that it will be for as long as the wolds exist.  
  
Please review! 


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